A matter of safety and money

OPINION

Our position: It makes no sense for Florida to give up money with a lax seat-belt law.

October 6, 2005|By Fuchsia

With a mind-boggling $23 billion backlog of needed transportation improvements over the next decade, you'd think Florida lawmakers would leap at the chance to claim a $498 million pot of federal transportation money.

Not this Legislature.

For years, lawmakers have stubbornly buried a measure that would allow law enforcement to pull over and ticket motorists who don't buckle up. As things stand, most motorists first must commit another traffic offense, such as littering, to also be ticketed for a seat-belt violation. Only motorists younger than 18 are subject to primary-enforcement laws.

That's not good enough.

It's not good enough to leverage a share of the $498 million that Congress is giving 22 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico for enacting so-called primary-enforcement laws. It's not good enough to save the 262 people who might otherwise have survived fatal accidents this year on Florida roads. It's not good enough to dent the $636 million a year in lost wages, escalating insurance rates and other costs associated with the Legislature's refusal to pass a primary-enforcement law. And it's not good enough to reduce by an estimated 20 percent the number of patients who clog trauma units with automobile-related injuries.

Seat-belt compliance nationwide hovers at a record 82 percent. But in Florida, that rate fell in June of this year to 73.9 percent, compared with 76.3 percent in June 2004.